The Life of Nathanael Greene, Major-General in the Army of the Revolution

Biography | Geo. F. Cooledge & Brother | 1849

Simms was interested in the American
Revolution throughout his career, writing significant works about the conflict in
both fiction and nonfiction. By 1840, he
had already produced the first edition of his History of South Carolina as well as two of his Revolutionary
Romances, all of which are works largely concerned with the effect of the
Revolution on his native state. Around
this same time, Simms had decided to complement this work by writing biographies. In April 1840, he wrote to James Lawson that
he was “meditating and taking notes for several Biographies—say Marion, Sumter,
Pickens, Moultrie &c.—worthies of Carolina Revolutionary History.”[1] Eventually, Simms produced two biographies of
Revolutionary War figures—The Life of
Francis Marion and The Life of
Nathanael Greene, Major-General in the Army of the Revolution.

Simms made relatively few
comments about Nathanael Greene in his
letters. In September 1840, he wrote that
he was “taking notes for my life of Greene” but then did not mention this
project again until October 1843, when he wrote George Frederick Holmes that
his biography of Francis Marion “may be followed up by Lives of Greene &
Sumter.”[2] Simms took up the project in earnest by at
least 1848, as evidenced by a July 1848 letter to Lawson in which he stated, “I
am busy on the Greene which I will finish this month.”[3] A month later, he announced he was “getting
on slowly” with the project, though by a 27 August letter to Lawson, he
announced that he had “just got through the Greene (mum!).”[4] While the book lacks a definitive publication
date, Nathanael Greene was
copyrighted in 1849 by its publisher, George F. Cooledge & Brother. Simms makes no mention of this work in the Letters after this, and Keen Butterworth
and James E. Kibler, Jr.’s William
Gilmore Simms: A Reference Guide lists only one review of Nathanael Greene — an 1858 notice from Russell’s magazine that gives a passing
mention of the book as part of a biographical sketch of Greene.[5] While Butterworth and Kibler’s Reference Guide may not be an exhaustive
survey of reviews, it is significant that the only one they mention is from
nine years after Nathanael Greene’s
ostensible publication; when combined with the few words Simms himself had to
say about the work, it seems likely that Nathanael
Greene was a lightly regarded and obscure work.

Nathanael Greene’s obscurity is perhaps appropriate, as the exact
extent of Simms’s own involvement with its creation is unclear. He signs the book as the “editor,” and this
creates much of the confusion surrounding the work Simms did in producing Nathanael Greene. In his editorial advertisement, he notes that
he had “consulted nearly all the volumes which promised to have any bearing
upon the subject,” including “the copious biographical sketches of Johnson, and
the several volumes of Lee, Ramsay, Moultrie, Marshall, Tarleton, Graydon, and
others, not forgetting the very graceful memoir of Greene, from the pen of his
grandson.”[6] There have long been various views about what
Simms’s editorship actually entailed.
William P. Trent, Simms’s earliest biographer, noted in 1892 that the
book “purports to be edited by Simms.
There is, however, no reason to believe that he did not write it. He speaks, it is true, of [revising earlier
biographical treatments of Greene,] but Simms’s ear-marks are visible through
the whole of it”[7] Yet, John C. Guilds’s 1992 biographical
treatment of Simms does not discuss Nathanael
Greene, nor even list it in the bibliography of the author’s works.[8] In “Simms’s Editing of The Life of Nathanael Greene,” (1978) Frederick Wagner makes a compelling
case that Simms had merely “abridged and paraphrased” William P. Johnson’s 1822
Sketches of the Life and Correspondence
of Nathanael Greene. While Simms’s
editorial advertisement mentions Johnson’s work, and thus provides “himself
some protection against a charge of plagiarism,” Wagner suggests that Simms
“seems to have intended to obscure his actual procedure than to illuminate it.”[9] Historian Sean Busick complicates this
picture, noting that “Simms did think highly of Johnson’s biography” and that
“Johnson gave [Simms] an autographed copy of the book.”[10] While Busick agrees with Wagner that a
“textual analysis of Simms’s book and Johnson’s biography does indeed reveal
Simms’s close reliance on Johnson,” he asserts that “it is also clear that
Simms carefully weighed Johnson’s account against others’ and wrote the
biography using his own words.” Busick
concludes that while “Johnson provided the major source,” it was far from the
only work Simms drew on, and his “rewriting and revising was more substantial
than the term ‘editing’ sometimes implies.”[11]

The 1849 copyrighted edition of The Life of Nathanael Greene also
includes “Southern Army: A Narrative of
the Campaign of 1780,” written by Colonel Otho Holland Williams, as an
appendix. The South Caroliniana
Library’s copy of the book features brown front and back boards with an ornate
frame stamp. Its spine is brown with
gilt stamp reading: [perched eagle] |
LIFE OF | GENERAL | NATH. GREENE | [rule] | SIMMS. | [ornate grouping of sword,
arrows, laurel, chain, and flags] | [man dressed in revolutionary uniform
standing beside a canon] | [ornate scroll] | ILLUSTRATED | LIBRARY. The title page reads: THE LIFE | OF |
NATHANAEL GREENE, | MAJOR-GENERAL IN THE ARMY OF THE REVOLUTION. | EDITED BY |
W. GILMORE SIMMS, ESQ., | AUTHOR OF "LIFE OF MARION," "CAPT.
JOHN SMITH," ETC. | NEW YORK: | GEORGE F. COOLEDGE & BROTHER, |
PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS, | 323 PEARL STREET.

[8]
Appendix V of Guild’s Simms: A Literary
Life announces itself as “The Writings of William Gilmore Simms Appearing
in Book Form,” with an explanatory note that states that the list “includes all
first publications (regardless of brevity) issued separately in ‘book form’ and
all book-length publications, whether or not in ‘book form,’ issued during
Simms’s lifetime.” The reasons for
Guilds’s exclusion of Nathanael Greene
are unclear. John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville:
The University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 359.